Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Recent sightings of the 71-year-old Vladimir Putin tend to be described in the hushed tones of a concerned matron. Did you see his arm tremble? Why is he looking so puffy and pale? What’s all that table-gripping about? The desire to know what is going on behind the scenes at the Kremlin has grown exponentially since the war in Ukraine began over 18 months ago. Into this imaginative vacuum strides Giuliano da Empoli’s first novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, an acute and timely dissection of Russian power, told through the eyes of a shadowy political adviser to Putin.
The so-called “wizard” of the novel is Vadim Baranov, a fictional figure whose penchant for avant-garde theatrics and disruptive propaganda bears apparent similarities to Putin’s former political adviser Vladislav Surkov — known for establishing Russia’s political doctrines of “sovereign democracy” and the “vertical of power”, a system in which the buck stops with one man and one man alone.
“The only thing that matters in Russia is privilege, proximity to power. Everything else is secondary,” Baranov tells his urbane interlocutor — seemingly a version of the author himself — during a nighttime meeting in Moscow. Baranov, who is retired from political life at the time of the interview, recounts his contributions to the political rise of Putin, whom he revealingly nicknames “the tsar.”
Da Empoli, 49, is an Italian and Swiss political essayist who knows a thing or two about power: he was a political adviser to the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. The Wizard of the Kremlin was in fact originally written in French; the book sold more than half a million copies in France and failed to win the Prix Goncourt only by a whisker. In an interview with Paris Match, da Empoli said of Surkov, “He is so romantic that he freed me and pushed me to become a novelist.”
Willard Wood’s extremely well-rendered translation captures the pithiness of a novel that pinpoints Putin’s rise to power during the Yeltsin years and culminates with the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war that began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Baranov advises Putin on events in Chechnya, the presidential election of 2000, the sinking of the Kursk submarine and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. He also deploys a skill set derived from his time as a producer of reality TV shows during the 1990s to develop the Kremlin’s disruptive digital strategies. Hewing closely to the historical record, da Empoli describes Baranov/Surkov’s job as about manufacturing “situations where anger can go wild without putting the whole system in danger”.
This fresco of power skilfully traces Putin’s marginalisation of oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky in favour of the so-called siloviki, or strongmen of the security services. “That’s how the state once again became the source of all things in Russia,” Baranov notes. Putin himself emerges as a lone wolf who works as others sleep and is obsessed by Russia’s bloody past, particularly the Stalin years. “You think Stalin is popular in spite of the massacres,” Putin tells Baranov. “Well you’re wrong, he’s popular because of the massacres. Because at least he knew how to deal with thieves and traitors.”
While da Empoli’s portrait of Putin as cold and calculating is par for the course, he also hints at a little-boy-lost quality and how different things might have been if the US had shared some of its limelight after the end of the cold war. “We made the Berlin Wall fall, not they,” Putin tells Baranov. “We dissolved the Warsaw Pact. And we held out our hand to them as a sign of peace, not surrender. It would be nice if they remembered this from time to time.”
Nonetheless, the beginning of the Ukraine conflict in 2014 is shown to be a natural, chilling continuation of the same belligerence that characterised Putin’s first steps as prime minister in 1999. “The ascetic official had suddenly transformed into the angel of death,” Baranov says. “It was the first time I’d seen a phenomenon of this kind. Never, even on the stages of the best theatres, had I witnessed a similar transfiguration.” Then as now, Putin’s reward was to be embraced by the majority of Russians, in ways many in the west still struggle to comprehend.
“The tsar’s empire was born of war, and it was logical in the end it should turn back to war,” says Baranov. “It was the unshakable foundation of our power, its original vice.”
The Wizard of the Kremlin: A Novel by Giuliano da Empoli (translated by Willard Wood) Pushkin Press £16.99/Other Press $16.99, 304 pages